Shunning AI is the human choice

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/hating-ai-is-good-actually

by cdrnsf • 2 months ago

373 515 2 months ago

splittydev3• 2 months ago

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

mrbungie2• 2 months ago

AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.

To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

tptacek• 2 months ago

There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).

empath752• 2 months ago

I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train.

You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.

There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.

b65e8bee43c2ed04• 2 months ago

none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.

elpocko4• 2 months ago

To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.

logicchains4• 2 months ago

people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.

All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.

potsandpans• 2 months ago

I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children."

There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair.

This is the world now.

justonepost27• 2 months ago

The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.

Procrastes• 2 months ago

As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess?

Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...

fontain• 2 months ago

That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.

chasd007• 2 months ago

My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating.

I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.

I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.

/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice

tiahura• 2 months ago

50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.

echelon4• 2 months ago

Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time.

Horse carriage drivers -> Cars

Print media -> Internet

Drafting -> CAD

Music -> Electronic music, DAWs

Film photography -> Digital

Traditional film special effects -> CGI

Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)

In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.

This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.

It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.

I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".

It's some kind of sick comedy.

watwut• 2 months ago

Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. There are few billionaire owners and that is it. Small independent journalism as such basically stopped to exist - it was replaced by basically hot takes. Low key institutional fact checking does not exist anymore, local news dont exist anymore.

So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy most of journalism. Because it did.

d0liver2• 2 months ago

Getting people into coding is both cool and also not specific to AI.

dfxm12• 2 months ago

If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?

dale_glass• 2 months ago

I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would.

https://xkcd.com/1170/

Filligree• 2 months ago

I mean. Yes? Probably?

enoint• 2 months ago

If all my friends drove 75 mph, would I risk driving 15 mph in front of them?

dist-epoch2• 2 months ago

Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.

mrspuratic• 2 months ago

Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 months ago

Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.

probably_wrong• 2 months ago

If you can't fight them, join them.

This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.

And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.

crazyfingers• 2 months ago

join them

Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.

XorNot• 2 months ago

This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result.

The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind".

But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it.

The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.

the_snooze• 2 months ago

That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.

DiabloD3• 2 months ago

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.

pelasaco2• 2 months ago

You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?

virgildotcodes2• 2 months ago

Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually.

If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.

KerrAvon• 2 months ago

What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.

velcrovan9• 2 months ago

I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.

https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

7tflutter75• 2 months ago

The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.

asklq• 2 months ago

It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency.

Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".

If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.

The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.

7tflutter75• 2 months ago

So your master plan is to purposely work ten times slower than everyone else to prove a point to a CEO who doesn't know your name?

otabdeveloper46• 2 months ago

It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".

Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.

Paradigma112• 2 months ago

Of course these graduates have agency. So do the companies not employing them. Telling them to deal with it is well meant advice, not an attempt to coerce them into compliance. To be honest most likely nobody cares deeply if they take that advice or not.

malfist2• 2 months ago

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

chasd007• 2 months ago

only time will tell, make your bets. carefully.

mpalmer2• 2 months ago

I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on.

What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.

- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"

- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities

- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general

- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match

dburkland• 2 months ago

Bingo

afavour3• 2 months ago

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it".

You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

splittydev3• 2 months ago

The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened?

Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

barnabee2• 2 months ago

I feel about the same about both cars and AI.

Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.

I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.

QuadmasterXLII• 2 months ago

You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.

jayd16• 2 months ago

It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.

SubmarineClub2• 2 months ago

Doubt.

How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools?

Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming.

I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.

bigstrat20033• 2 months ago

They aren't even good at programming, despite the repeated claims to the contrary by AI bros.

duchef2• 2 months ago

I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in.

I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice).

I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online

JeremyNT• 2 months ago

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.

If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."

7tflutter75• 2 months ago

^ doomscrolling john connor

bsza4• 2 months ago

AI is here to stay

I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.

How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

7tflutter75• 2 months ago

Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.

chasd007• 2 months ago

Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

"we'll allow" is doing a lot of work here. There is no collective without boots on the necks of everyone except for the people wearing the boots.

reaperducer• 2 months ago

AI is here to stay

I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.

It's become a religion. Or more to the point — a cult.

All worship the holy, sacred AI. Resist its hallowed inevitability and you will be excoriated in public.

keybored2• 2 months ago

Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.

Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.

righthand4• 2 months ago

This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?

beej712• 2 months ago

Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.

tootie• 2 months ago

Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.

kalleboo3• 2 months ago

AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight.

We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)

We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.

This is what we keep being told.

So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.

jolt42• 2 months ago

When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.

mpalmer2• 2 months ago

    We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)

FWIW the people saying this tend to be remarkably ignorant.

geremiiah2• 2 months ago

If you can't fight them, join them.

That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.

iceflinger• 2 months ago

Cool, fighting it is then.

bob1029• 2 months ago

I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.

ModernMech• 2 months ago

A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

Agreed.

20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products

what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies

giancarlostoro2• 2 months ago

I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.

tavavex7• 2 months ago

The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.

827a• 2 months ago

Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.

ai-x• 2 months ago

Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality

AnimalMuppet2• 2 months ago

I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations.

I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.

lbrito5• 2 months ago

This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes.

AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.

When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.

dspillett2• 2 months ago

To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.

If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)

Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…

orangecoffee• 2 months ago

One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?

mancerayder2• 2 months ago

Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone.

Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.

Aurornis• 2 months ago

Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.

Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.

What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.

skydhash• 2 months ago

Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly

The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there.

I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.

davebren2• 2 months ago

but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.

Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.

HarHarVeryFunny• 2 months ago

Developers are a TINY percentage of the population (< 1%). The anti-AI sentiment is coming from the other 99%.

jgbuddy2• 2 months ago

True

vitality6637• 2 months ago

"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."

soloto• 2 months ago

Assumed future facts are not facts, they are just your opinion.

satvikpendem7• 2 months ago

Interesting what the disconnect is between what the vocal minority say about AI versus the vast majority who use it every day and do not care, such as coders and even regular people, as ChatGPT has almost a billion users.

hatsuseno• 2 months ago

Yeah, that figure of a billion comes from OpenAI directly, I wouldn't put too much stock in its validity or relevance.

SketchySeaBeast• 2 months ago

It also doesn't qualify how or how often the users use the app. Online games like to do this too - "40M registered users!" when the number of players with an active subscription are a tiny fraction.

rglullis• 2 months ago

One can use it even while hating it.

b65e8bee43c2ed04• 2 months ago

it is very amusing to read delusional takes like "everyone hates AI" when everyone I know who uses a computer for work is increasingly reliant on chatbots.

I don't know how many times do these people need to be taught that their little bubble of terminally online folx is not "everyone". twice is not enough, apparently.

energy123• 2 months ago

Opinion polling of the public about AI paints a very unfavorable picture, so it's not delusional. People use it but they fear it's going to take their livelihood. At the very least it has injected a significant amount of uncertainty into people's lives.

footy• 2 months ago

twice is not enough, apparently.

what is this a reference to?

1shooner• 2 months ago

"My bubble is more correct then the bubble of those I disagree with". There are objective data to refer to:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955

dist-epoch2• 2 months ago

This is the old "why do protesters against capitalism have iPhones" defense.

Lambdanaut• 2 months ago

I'm not sure what you mean because you didn't actually say it, but AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.

Source: https://pos.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/260072-NBC-March-...

ieie33662• 2 months ago

And how much of this is due to the sloppers/grifters/conmen who hopped on to the AI train (same thing which happened to crypto?)

I feel like that is what the hate needs to be directed towards. Same thing with crypto. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with the technology itself. It’s that we are letting these scammers become the face of it

jrflo• 2 months ago

People hate the concept of AI taking their jobs and the top-down implementation of it at many companies. People love chatbots.

TOMDM• 2 months ago

AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.

I don't think your source substantiates that.

From your source:

ICE

Somewhat negative: 9%

Very negative: 47%

Somewhat negative: 24%

Very negative: 22%

redwall_hp• 2 months ago

Pew Research highlights:

* A majority of Americans consider the risk of AI to society high, a minority consider the benefits high

* A majority are more concerned than excited about AI

* Americans feel strongly that it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI, but are not confident in their ability to do so

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

It seems almost universally reviled in creative fields, and the use I mostly see from ordinary people is more along the lines of natural language searches with Gemini.

AI fans are a bubble within the bubble of technology enthusiasts. It's hardly even universally liked among software engineers.

esrauch• 2 months ago

I think the vast majority of people just "don't care" for all possible topics.

prmoustache• 2 months ago

People are much less binary.

A lot of people can hate the existence and most of the consequences of something yet use it, sparingly or addictively

People can hate impact of the car centric societies and its impact on the climate yet use a car and find it convenient when not overused.

Social medias is another example. A lot of people agree for the most part it didn't make our society better yet they are addicted to doomscroll on instagram or tiktok.

People can use chatgpt to get a picture of them in Myasaki style yet hate that AI can be used to get rid of jobs. Even at developers level, some people might find AI useful in some areas but hate vibecoding and AI slop.

simonklitj• 2 months ago

Even just in my family, the attitude has shifted significantly over the last year. Most of my family members are now critical of it and its effects.

Add to this that if ~6B people are using the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage), and ChatGPT only has almost a billion users (and is the largest player in the space), then I’d argue that LLM-users are in fact the minority.

psvv• 2 months ago

I'm not so sure the silent majority is positive on AI, I think the opposite is more likely. Let's not forget that national poll where it was less popular than ICE -- I think it was 26% positive vs 46% negative.

My view is AI is becoming a poster-child for the increasing wealth disparity. When people are negative on AI it's not just the technology but the entire idea around it. It's simply cool to hate AI and that's going to be a hard hill to overcome, I think.

righthand4• 2 months ago

There’s only a billion people on earth? You’re right that is the vast majority of people.

echelon4• 2 months ago

I'm in film and highly exposed to the AI media and arts scene. I was very early to this hate, and I've experienced it personally by the metric boat load.

I'm fine with people not liking the technology, but the number of death threats, rude comments ("your mother didn't use the coat hanger well enough"), and literal stalking and doxxing I've received from some of these rabidly anti-AI people is appalling.

Whatever compels people to throw paint onto fine art or to block traffic for hours (including emergency vehicles and people just trying to get home) is the same bug a lot of these anti-AI griefers have.

I take great joys when luminaries in animation, illustration, game development, etc. announce that they're using AI tools and that they enjoy them. It's one of my sweetest pleasures after enduring the anti-AI outrage day in and day out for years.

stuartjohnson122• 2 months ago

I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.

Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.

My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.

The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.

The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.

chasd007• 2 months ago

I was president of a neighborhood association in an entertainment district in Dallas TX some years ago ( Deep Ellum ). The group worked really hard to get Deep Ellum out of nasty downturn and bring new business to the neighborhood. We got a lot of push back from people wanting Deep Ellum to return to the way it was in the late 90s. That was impossible, nothing will ever return to the WayItWas(tm). What I realized was a lot of those voices wanted their lives to be like it was in the late 90s, it had nothing to do with the neighborhood, it was them. I think many people who get the angriest are actually angry with themselves and not the issue du jour.

spaqin• 2 months ago

Funny, growing up in the same world I'm coming to the exact opposite view - instead of unique poops and kids using limited tools in the most creative ways, we'll be getting rehashes of everything, looking mostly the same.

Yes, media production is not fun. And that's what we as humans value in art - the labor. Easy things don't impress us. And by sticking to the default, easy option, with barely any good reason to embrace the suck and learn the difficult tools and processes, I can only see decline.

justonepost27• 2 months ago

It will take a few years for the multigenerational dark age to set in, but eventually you too will realize that they had a point.

jasonlotito3• 2 months ago

Give me one anti-AI point that is ignored and/or not considered by "pro-AI" groups. I'm genuinely curious what it is.

jasonlotito3• 2 months ago

I think the most challenging part about these people is that it makes it so much harder to address real concerns with AI. I use it, but even I recognize that it needs to be considered carefully. I've been lucky in that most people who use AI that I've encountered have been willing to have great conversations on the pros and cons, the concerns, etc.

However, the moment som anti-AI person comes in, they immediately want to go scorched earth. I just wished they'd use even half this energy for something more impactful.

righthand4• 2 months ago

Being upset about blocked traffic for a protest but not upset that the rich are trying to kill off the labor market is the exact hilariously short sighted issue.

echelon4• 2 months ago

kill off the labor market

This is such a comical take. There is going to be more demand, not less.

And hypothetically, if they did kill off the labor market, they did it in the wrong country. Everyone here owns guns.

Work will be fine.

randypewick• 2 months ago

I think that too many people are conflating their hate for AI, which is a technology, with the sick dynamics pushing it to gain profit. It's consumerism and capitalism to blame, AI is just a technology. As such, we want our leaders to be able to properly use such tech. But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.

vaylian• 2 months ago

But our leaders are clearly unable to do so.

What should be done then?

chasd007• 2 months ago

I use AI and see value in it but agree the hype train is very annoying. My employer tracks how much we're using AI related tools and has a KPI we need to hit. Thats very annoying too. Reminds of communism: "ideas so great they're mandatory", AI: "A tool so amazing its use is mandatory".

delabay• 2 months ago

In the battle of shape rotators vs wordcells, the wordcells have far more to gain with AI. This journo will come around.

endymion-light4• 2 months ago

There's a massive difference between the hatred of a CEO who is actively wanting to replace workers with what is essentially applied mathematics. AI seems more like easy reasoning for mass-layoffs & cost saving measures - and I rarely see articles that actually attempt to delve into this, instead seeking to just cancel out an entire technology.

This article doesn't hate AI - it hates capitalism - which is a completely different argument, the underlying system was broken already, AI has just excasperated some of the concerns. Things like awful SEO + low effort art were already happening beforehand, they're just become far easier.

And maybe a big problem is that AI = ChatGPT for the vast majority of people, including the person who wrote this artcle.

This article specifically cites things like the Commonwealth Prize - a prize that if you look at historically, wasn't exactly an example of brilliant prose. Surely that's far more of a inditement on the quality of judging for a prize if it can be won by poor writing.

A lot of the issues cited within this article just seem hollow, as they're issues that were pervasive before ChatGPT. AI isn't a panacea, but hating a technology because bad people use it feels reductionist.

I think a far bigger problem is that the majority of the population doesn't have good knowledge of AI or Software in general, including CEOs. I'd love to see journalists that have a good understanding of the actual technology.

lccerina2• 2 months ago

You don't need to have a "good knowledge" of a misused technology to hate it when it's used by malevolent people. In the same way I don't need to be a virologist to know that is better to avoid the flu, I don't need to be a ML/AI expert to see its direct detrimental effects on people, communities, and the internet as a whole.

endymion-light4• 2 months ago

But given your example - I don't care much for the opinion of someone who believes flu is spread by sinful thoughts. It's good to have a base understanding of something that you'd like to speak about.

Are local LLM models also within this hate sphere? What about fully open source vision models? That's what makes an article like this feel hollow - it's just someone talking about vibes.

Or to quote the article:

" But while I took mental notes on what I was observing, I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI. The people like me who have only the vaguest idea of what defines AI, but extremely specific examples of why it sucks. "

That's why I think this article is a criticism of neoliberal capitalism rather than anything else. If it wasn't AI, it would be robotics, if it wasn't robotics, it would be Quantum. But i'd like to see better substance in articles on this site rather than just a dislike of robots.

headcanon• 2 months ago

To use your analogy, I would say the "blanket ban" attitude would be more like wishing all viruses would just go away, or have never existed in the first place, which:

1) is an impossible and unproductive attitude, and

2) fails to recognize the important contribution to evolution, genetic diversity, and our immune systems that viruses introduced, not to mention the possible beneficial applications that could exist by understanding it.

Rejecting something without nuance makes you more vulnerable down the road because it prevents you from building an effective immunity. Engaging with it is the only productive way to mitigate its downsides and promote its benefits.

skimmed• 2 months ago

But if someone creates and releases a new super-flu would you hate the flu or the person releasing it?

oleganza• 2 months ago

Sorry for the irony, but the article is so long, i asked gpt to extract key points.

I think what'd be a stronger point is talking about centralization of the quality models. Modern AI tools are inherently centralized around huge shared infrastructure that gives enormous leverage (== capacity for abuse) to those owning the infrastructure. This is true even if you have strong competition among several players: each of them would converge on some business model and majority of users would not be bothered with long-term consequences if they receive very tangible short-term value.

The tooling is amazing, amount of productivity we unlock is fantastic and it's getting better by the day. But we need to watch out for collateral damage too. The future is somewhere there, but we can steer it towards being more or less hazardous.

rokob• 2 months ago

I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.

rd42• 2 months ago

I kinda get the hate now - all of social media is being awash with AI. I think maybe a better option is to have new social media which is restricted to humans and human produced content. Hard to enforce - but I am sure there are ways out there.

davrosthedalek• 2 months ago

Or, maybe it's beginning of the end of social media. Might not be the worst idea.

morelandjs• 2 months ago

It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.

philipallstar• 2 months ago

So Allen will continue to bankroll the former media titan’s obsession, as he promises (without evidence) that AI will right the ship. Lucky, to be sure, but also part of the mass delusion that AI is not just worth our money, but owed our respect.

What mass delusion is this? I've never heard of that.

velcrovan9• 2 months ago

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back.

Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

sesm• 2 months ago

"AI" is a marketing term, LLMs and Difusion Models are math.

egui• 2 months ago

The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

velcrovan9• 2 months ago

To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?

I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.

pear01• 2 months ago

This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.

This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.

I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?

davebren2• 2 months ago

Seems more like a materialist religious project to me.

smegger001• 2 months ago

Exactly no one hates the ai algorithm finding cancer, or predicting protein folding or finding novel compounds for pharmaceuticals what they hate is the "we will slurp up all human knowledge violate everyone copyrights and give nothing back in return and get you fired and replaced by a shitty ai chatbot"

bsza4• 2 months ago

It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.

velcrovan9• 2 months ago

It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.

I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)

jayGlow3• 2 months ago

chips limiting what kind of software can be run sounds absolutely awful and would be a huge overstep in government power. once I buy a piece of hardware I should be able to run whatever I want on it.

Tubelord• 2 months ago

Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.

velcrovan9• 2 months ago

This is funny and a pretty clever move, but not actually the argument I'm making. I'm specifically saying you can't make people un-learn math once it turns out to have interesting uses.

ThinkingGuy• 2 months ago

The difference between generative AI and math is that math gives everybody the same answer every time.

WorldMaker5• 2 months ago

The problem is that isn't just math, the problem is more specifically one of the weakest maths for our entire species: Probability and Statistics. Humans as a general rule are terrible at Probability and Statistics.

Being angry at LLMs isn't hating math, it is hating slot machines and the human inclination to lose everything to them because the Gambler's Fallacy affects us all, unfortunately deeply.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

"Hating "AI" ins the abstract is like hating public-key encryption."

It's more like hating the Almquist shell, or UNIX utilities in general

In practice, for most of the population, "AI" is someone else's software. Maybe some dislike using it

But as the commencement speaker at Middle Tennessee State said, "Deal with it. Like I said, it's a tool."

The UNIX shell and utilities are out there, running on billions of computers. There's no going back

I chose to adapt. But many "software developers" will futilely keep demanding that the UNIX shell go away and be replaced by something else

ofrzeta• 2 months ago

It's not "just math". It's also operating huge datacenters. You can do this or not.

satisfice• 2 months ago

She wasn’t hating it in the abstract. Read the article. She’s not upset with mathematics.

aswegs8• 2 months ago

I don't want to sound fatalistic, but in the end, the machine is too powerful to be stopped. With machine I don't mean AI, but rather the financial machine of the US.

thrw0453• 2 months ago

To me AI is a really strange technology. When it works it works very well, but at the same time it can't be trusted because of hallucinations. I still get hallucinations just as I did 2 years ago. Nothing has changed. Some part of me feels like it should be shut down for that alone so that it doesn't spread misinformation all over the place.

I also think most of what AI generates is slop and nowhere near the quality of a human creation. Maybe that will change, maybe not. In the end I'm not sure how I feel about it. I don't use it that often, maybe a few times a week.

dandaka2• 2 months ago

It is called 'jagged intelligence'. A lot progress was made in the last 2 years. Most notably reasoning models, tools use, harness progress. It takes time to build the skill to make those models useful, but they do provide a lot of value.

thrw0453• 2 months ago

Ah yeah jagged intelligence is the perfect phrase for it. I do also get some value from them, both in coding and in images. I find it the least usable for information primarily because of the hallucination problem. I still do use it for that purpose but it's kind of annoying when it writes something that's wrong, and I find it out from a Google search later.

bigstrat20033• 2 months ago

That is indeed the problem. And when you have to meticulously check everything that the LLM does (because you can't know where the hallucinations will be), it completely destroys any productivity benefits you would gain from having it write the code in the first place. Thus you wind up going no faster (if not slower) than you did in the first place. The only way to go super fast (the way some people claim they are) is to discard quality.

As has been pointed out over and over: the time consuming part of programming was never typing code into the computer, it was understanding the problem and the logic behind the code. Using an LLM only addresses the fast and easy part of programming, not the hard parts.

ihumanable2• 2 months ago

I don't use much AI, but we have an AI agent that reviews all of our PRs at work.

It's pretty good, I actually like it because it's very thorough and catches real things.

On a recent PR though it very confidently pointed out an "error" and suggested a "fix." Now I authored this code by hand and the "error" was it going "this one doesn't look like all the other ones" and I'm a relatively consistent person so it's not the kind of mistake I would make, which means I probably put thought in and the difference was intentional.

I looked at it's suggestion carefully and my original code was correct, the "fix" would have broken the logic. Not a huge deal all things said.

But I'm looking back at it's original report, it's comprehensive, confident, and ends with "Reply 'fix this for me' and I will fix it" and it made me think about more junior engineers.

I double checked it because I had written the code by hand, I understood the context, I also have enough experience to know that if I wrote this one function differently there was probably a good reason. But if I were earlier in my career, with less experience, would I have just clicked the easy button?

Probably. Especially if everyday I'm clicking the easy button.

Highway engineers used to think it was a good idea to make highways as straight as possible, people going in a straight line is easiest right? They realized that if you didn't put some curves in the road that people would just disengage and a perfect straight "easy" highway was much more dangerous than one with curves. I feel like AI is an "easy" highway

Ecys• 2 months ago

Lol. https://x.com/Marakath/status/2056341063342633336

q3k• 2 months ago

The low-effort presentation perfectly matches the low-effort argument. Not a single second of human brainpower went into making this an it shows.

throwpoaster• 2 months ago

Pass. Hate is never good.

cmrdporcupine2• 2 months ago

As an ex-Googler I'll say this: The problem with Eric Schmidt isn't (always) the particulars of the things he says. It's the smug I-know-best "boomer" tone he delivers it with, and the crass obliviousness to his relative position of privilege and power.

Googlers/Xooglers will recall the "my various houses" quip at TGIF some years ago which memegen had a field day with.

Also his multiple events where he brought in Kissinger to have "fireside chats" for Googlers to watch/attend.

In fact his "father knows best" attitude ties directly in with his Kissinger fixation: this realpolitik "practical" vision of a world of inevitable powerful forces that you just have to learn to ride with .. which is just really a skin over "might makes right" under another name. Kissinger was explicitly so, and Schmidt admired him for it. Who cares about million horrifically killed in Cambodia if America is stronger for it?

It's also not honestly all that far from the "Effective Altruism" stuff, too: some powerful person comes up with a system of "pragmatic" and utilitarian justifications for the forces-that-already-are and makes it sound like a programme-for-betterment when it's really just a method for their own further enrichment and ego satisfaction.

Many of us legitimately boo this. Not because we're naive. Or stupid. But because our own sense of agency in the world and democratic ethics means we see agency for collectives of people which work along broad and participatory lines. And because we "naively" believe in justice and maybe a vague Kantian notion of ethics which tries to treat other humans as ends in themselves.

Y'know. So-called basic enlightenment, modernist values.

The "inevitable AI" stuff is just an icing on an overall cake. Standing in front of a bunch of young people who still have energy and spirit and the ability to shape the world and telling them that the best way to shape the future is to accept the form that it's already taking and ride-along and profit is next level douchebaggery, even from Schmidt.

(I also have to muse out loud that the specific vile form Google has taken in the second decade of its existence relates to this same mentality. The Google of the founder's letter at IPO sounds nothing like the ... thing ... that exists now, and this seems to have everything to do with just yielding to what-is instead of making what-can-be)

dwa3592• 2 months ago

I think this highlights the dichotomy of AI use and how it's shaping everyone's opinion based on their own experience. It's your AI versus mine. You could be OpenAI with unlimited compute and disprove a conjecture or you could be the people referred in the article who are asking claude if a story is written by a human. Opus 4.7 can generate working code faster than I ever could but I still see it as a dumb word calculator bc of the mistakes it makes.

NietTim7• 2 months ago

Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.

inglor_cz6• 2 months ago

I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly.

It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable.

I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the same passion, but won't tell because the time isn't ripe yet.

NoGravitas5• 2 months ago

I'll tell. It's you. You personally, and no one else. Not a category of people that includes you. Just you.

satvikpendem7• 2 months ago

It's a type of engagement bait, people like posting things online which they know will rile up reactions.

NietTim7• 2 months ago

Weird responses you're getting, I agree with you fully, if someone is constantly putting on display what they hate I'll keep as far away from them as I can be.

subjectsigma5• 2 months ago

[flagged]

tavavex7• 2 months ago

You could ignore the ugly sides in 2018 or 2022, when the tech consisted of fun toys that existed alongside everything else and not instead of it.

In 2026, unless you're wealthy or are one of the few that don't need to use the internet to live, focusing on the ugly sides is not optional. When the ugly parts are coming for your employment, community, ability to own anything, your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society, you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore that, and then pretend like everyone pointing to the oncoming train is just a negative naysayer who's upset because they're bad and like to feel bad and no other reasons.

NietTim7• 2 months ago

Your argument clearly comes from a doomer perspective, your employment will be gone (Maybe, but you will find new employment), your community will be gone (?), your ability to own anything will be gone (?????)

your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society(??), you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore tha

I've clearly been on the internet longer then you, all of my favorite places are already gone. It's completely fine. Life is finite and there is something beautiful about that.

I wish you too will find the beauty in life at some point.

drdrey• 2 months ago

it's tribal, it feels good to rally against a common enemy

nibblecid• 2 months ago

I believe that the technology is not the problem! It is the people who use AI in bad/unhealthy/unethical ways. I bet that in 10 years, we'll have a movie like The Big Short style talking about all the crazy things people did with AI, and the audience will say, "Yeah! We saw it coming!" No, you didn't!

nilirl• 2 months ago

I’m not just skeptical. I'm against it.

I understand the sentiment but I don't think it's useful to take a directly antagonistic stance, especially when it's a losing battle.

For those who feel this way, our best hope is to keep searching for how we can have a world that values human effort and care, even after AI does everything it's proclaimed to do.

We can't declare the world a lost cause and relegate ourselves to only hating. We need to do what we've always done: roll with it.

BosunoB6• 2 months ago

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits.

Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against human flourishing in favor of the status quo.

afavour3• 2 months ago

Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.

Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.

joquarky6• 2 months ago

UBI is not a solution either, as it will inevitably fall into the same traps and favoritism as tax laws.

frotaur• 2 months ago

I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital.

People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.

BosunoB6• 2 months ago

Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation.

I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.

user342832• 2 months ago

I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia.

It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either.

We will pay people.

Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.

card_zero3• 2 months ago

I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either.

Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.

I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.

Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.

Jtarii5• 2 months ago

Humans will not flourish if you remove their jobs, they will become violent criminals because they will have nothing else to fill their days and no purpose in their community.

People may hate their job, but they will hate being unemployed way more.

corky_buchek• 2 months ago

This is an incredibly pessimistic view of humanity.

goda903• 2 months ago

People can find purpose without jobs. But they can't find purpose if they are struggling to survive. If jobs are the only legal path to survival, and there are no jobs, then people will be driven to "crime" to survive.

embracethenoid• 2 months ago

This is why rich inheritors usually become violent criminals. No jobs.

booleandilemma• 2 months ago

Work sucks, but try paying bills without working. Try buying food.

deaton2• 2 months ago

Its fine to hate work, whatever. But you wouldn't quit your job today, so why would you want to be replaced by an AI today?

UtopiaPunk3• 2 months ago

I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.

Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.

Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.

lbrito5• 2 months ago

That's not the future envisioned by AI pushers.

ironman1478• 2 months ago

It's highly cynical, but people need to work. It provides structure and most people don't do well with unstructured time.

Also, I find it odd that of all the automation being attempted with LLMs, we're automating the ones that actually are interesting, not the ones that are dangerous or truly rote, yet highly mechanical.

rf15• 2 months ago

Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good.

It's this "path of least resistance life style" that ruins a lot in our society. Yes, being wasteful is bad, but not appreciating the work is also bad.

OptionOfT• 2 months ago

While that may be true, all the automation that's happening is not making people work less.

Except by firing them, which is absolutely devastating, especially in places with 0 social protection like the USA.

And for other people the workload has actually increased because we're being pushed left and right to use AI to go FASTER, yet over and over we see proof that we need to validate EVERYTHING.

Automation is only useful if we use part of our brain to do something ELSE. Yet as a Software Engineer I cannot do that (full disclosure: I don't mind, I like to engineer and code).

But from a managerial point of view there is this aura of 'AI will solve all our problems', whereas what we're seeing is a deluge of slop where the people producing the slop THINK they're helping, yet they are parasitizing on the time of the people who validate the PRs.

BosunoB6• 2 months ago

Yeah but the tech doesn't end here. Sure, it doesn't make anybody particularly happy that the tech started here. It's kind of a bummer to automate creative labor that gets social esteem so early on.

But that's not the point. Where the tech ends is human-level intelligence that can do any task as well as a human and more cheaply.

dodu_• 2 months ago

Yeah surely the workers will be the ones reaping the downstream benefits of it right... right?

Anakin stare

fmkamchatka• 2 months ago

I’m not sure work sucks (at least as a general statement). Work is a way to be useful in the society and feeling useful is valuable for our wellbeing. I don’t think people who stop working and spend their days laying on the beach feel better.

AntronX• 2 months ago

I wish tech companies would stop shoving AI in my face everywhere. F off google i don't want to "ask ai" in maps. Get that ugly ai button off from messenger, meta. At least microslop winblows lets me remove crapilot buttons from apps.

gspr• 2 months ago

Lots of people on this site seem to be of the opinion that "AI is tech, you can't hate tech, only its use". That may be true, but I bet there'd be a whole lot less AI hate in society if:

(1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on cocaine all the time? It reminds me of proponents of cryptocurrencies. My eyes and ears are bleeding – the more you talk, the more I wanna avoid your technology.

(2) The companies involved would respect IP.

(3) Regulators would empower ordinary people to have some redress when their lives are affected by AI-powered decisions. (The flawed EU AI Act is a decent start.)

(4) Regulators would ensure that actors in the AI space pay the cost of the negative externalities they impose on everyone.

(5) See 1. I'm so tired.

EdgeExplorer2• 2 months ago

I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.

stephc_int132• 2 months ago

Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition.

Nothing new here.

What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.

I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.

spogbiper• 2 months ago

I think social media is a big factor. Anti-AI posts and comments are very popular on mainstream Reddit subs at least. Not sure if its a cause or an effect or even external manipulation

bluefirebrand5• 2 months ago

What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation.

Why would that surprise you? They aren't stupid. They can see that people are trying to position AI as a way to replace them.

stephc_int132• 2 months ago

My intuition would be that the resistance would come from grumpy old guys like me who spent most of their lives perfecting their craft.

kalleboo3• 2 months ago

What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation

It's repeatedly stated that while it's still improving, AI is coming for the entry level positions and the juniors first. How many times have you seen AI described as "like an eager junior"?

TRiG_Ireland• 2 months ago

I think this is the first article I've seen here which captures my practical concerns with AI, my moral concerns, my economic concerns, and also the emotional "true, profound, and guttural loathing". I hate it so much, and I immediately think less of anyone who uses it. It just feels so icky. And the times when I've been fooled into reading AI-generated texts I feel cheated. It's all so cheap and nasty.

thrw0453• 2 months ago

I can actually understand this view even if I don't agree with it in the same way.

I tried to use ChatGPT to edit and modify real photos I took, and it can do a good job changing the image in a photo realistic way, but at the same time, the images lack the "entropy" and "real lifeness" of the real photographs. The AI sort of flattens the images so that they look kind of cheap. It's almost imperceptible but it's there.

I also have seen some product sites like walmart use AI images for products, and whenever I see such an image my brain kind of rejects it and doesn't want to look at it. Not sure what that's about.

All of that being said, AI has created things on my behalf that I find valuable. Whether it's code or images or text. So it's not all bad, but it's just a very strange place where I'm not sure how I feel about it.

satvikpendem7• 2 months ago

That is a specific implementation of image models, not true for all image models. For example Civitai has a lot of realistic models that look like people took them, at least on first glance, as I'm sure with enough pixel peeping you can find discrepancies, point is the "flatness" look is with that specific ChatGPT model.

For example: https://civitai.com/models/2149369/iphone-realism

ihumanable2• 2 months ago

Magical editing of pictures is so wild to me. Most photos people take have a longterm have an audience of basically 1. That's why there's jokes about how awful it is when a coworker corners you to show you their vacation photos, the vast majority of photos taken by the average person are only ever going to be viewed again by the person taking it (and maybe their immediate family).

Memory is already this squishy thing and then when you go back to reminisce about {meaningful event} and go pull up your edited photos, what are you even looking at? Google used to play these ads constantly of editing stuff out, changing how the sky looks, etc.

It's present day you effectively gaslighting future you. What's the point of memorializing something and then immediately destroying the truth of what happened with a bunch of edits.

jklinger4102• 2 months ago

The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have.

I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions.

This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there.

So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.

Jtarii5• 2 months ago

It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else.

No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.

jklinger4102• 2 months ago

You don't think the concerns have any validity? Sounds kind of hand wavey to me.

leecommamichael• 2 months ago

Lots of people here saying “resistance is futile, so don’t resist.” I don’t care if it’s a losing “fight.” It’s not a single game. Truth is at stake, and we have to constantly fight any source of misinformation. There are times when LLMs are just fine, but they are seductive liars at worst, and we should never forget that.

jesse_dot_id10• 2 months ago

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very expensive bills that will be coming due in the coming months and years. They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.

frizlab2• 2 months ago

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

MisterTea2• 2 months ago

It's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine.

Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.

jesse_dot_id10• 2 months ago

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's.

This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.

deaton2• 2 months ago

The IP considerations, environmental considerations, "lol we're gonna destroy the world and get you laid off" considerations, and of course the big middle finger given to artists of all types, from authors to musicians... They painted themselves as villains and then they were shocked when people viewed them as such.

moffkalast2• 2 months ago

Piracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces.

Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.

palmotea• 2 months ago

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

I also hate it because:

1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.

2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.

jpttsn• 2 months ago

“You wouldn’t download a car” is making an unexpected comeback after all these years

TheOtherHobbes• 2 months ago

The ecological considerations are wildly overstated. Data centres in general != AI, and other industries, including meat production and (ironically) paper for print all use far more water and create more damage.

This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.

mindcrime3• 2 months ago

but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft

Two thoughts:

A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.

B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?

vrganj2• 2 months ago

Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations!

AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave.

That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.

Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?

All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.

satvikpendem7• 2 months ago

I (and I assume many others on especially HN) don't consider intellectual "property" as real so there is no "theft" in our minds, so this argument doesn't bear much weight.

jsbisviewtiful• 2 months ago

Everything you said plus now these out-of-touch and incredibly rich CEOs are shoving it in our faces that they are determined to take away our income while pocketing even more riches.

fourside• 2 months ago

it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI

I think it was partly also PR. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting for mindshare and Dalle-E, Sora, Nano banana, etc generated a lot of media buzz for Google and OpenAI at various points in time.

onemoresoop2• 2 months ago

Let’s not forget about the total surveillance we’re heading into thanks to AI. I wouldn’t say the technology is the problem per say but everything around it is. AI could be used for good, if we only didn’t have psychopaths serving their own interests at the detriment of the rest of us

linkregister• 2 months ago

There's no evidence to suggest that poisoning impacts generative model training in 2026. Frontier labs spend billions on tightly focused training plans, developing assessments and pursuing the long tail of assessment failures.

jmathai• 2 months ago

The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.

It's a cute thought that big tech wants our help to shape artificial intelligence.

hnthrow0287345• 2 months ago

They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.

Company goes under and they just start something else.

There's no real consequences. This is a club, not a market.

archagon• 2 months ago

If the powerful try to push this through to its logical conclusion, they might see an actual revolution.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 2 months ago

Did people hate the computer this much when it became a thing?

eloisius• 2 months ago

chasd007• 2 months ago

I distinctly remember people hating on Google search (and the internet in general) when things got going and how it will dumb everyone down and no one will understand how to use the card catalog at the local library anymore.

voncheese• 2 months ago

This, and the fact that AI is taking people's jobs away without (as far as we can tell) significantly creating new jobs for those people to move to.

The job impact is really pissing people off, rightfully so.

alansaber• 2 months ago

I'd find "hating labour replacement is good" a more compelling title.

JKCalhoun• 2 months ago

These grads, according to Schmidt, have no agency, which was confirmed by this comment a few minutes later: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on, Graduates, the rocket ship is here.”

Schmidt, by all means, is welcome to board the Good Ship Bubble-pop, but I think a lot of these grads are happy to instead watch from the viewing stand and wave goodbye.

I think his notion that AI is fait accompli is one of the (many) things being rejected.

d_burfoot• 2 months ago

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.

UtopiaPunk3• 2 months ago

Ishmael is a good read.

jackbravo• 2 months ago

What is it about?

voidmain2• 2 months ago

Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.

NoGravitas5• 2 months ago

Yep, it's all driven by Moloch, and nothing but.

bena2• 2 months ago

Historians. Well, one. Well, he's not a historian. He's a biochemist and physiologist who has studied some anthropology.

It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

NoGravitas5• 2 months ago

He's actually pulling that from about 70 years of anthropology and anthropological archaeology; it wasn't in any way original to him.

lbrito5• 2 months ago

I don't think that's a very mainstream view amongst historians. I can only name two popsci authors, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, that espouse that thought.

throw48472852• 2 months ago

Ok, but try the same argument with sedentary societies. Those seem "superior" despite all the negative side effects, right? But here comes one of a number of steppe nomad tribes to show up and decimate their "superior" neighbors.

The vast diversity of human societies refuses any kind of rigid hierarchy of development. There are many branching paths, and no paradigm wins for long.

History is a not a game of Civilization.

_-_-__-_-_-• 2 months ago

That website sucks. My thoughts, https://theonlyblogever.com/blog/2026/distrust.html.

goosejuice2• 2 months ago

I understand some of the sentiment, but these folks certainly won't be denying the drug discovered through AI that will save their life or that of their children.

I don't think people truly hate AI. What they hate is how it's used. That's a very different thing and it's a human problem not a technology problem.

cphoover• 2 months ago

I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.

analog8374• 2 months ago

It is what it is. Unless it threatens you. Then it's bad And then you prefer a narrative explaining why it's bad. And then you you propagate that narrative. And then that narrative infects the hive.

hansmayer2• 2 months ago

Such fantastic writing. I particularly love the last passage - not only it is reminiscent of how great op-eds used to close, but also for it's clear and un-ambigious call to action - you have the agency and no, you don't have to "deal with it", i.e. deal with lazy morons pasting you LLM-generated walls of text for discussion.

geremiiah2• 2 months ago

Political and economic ramification aside, if we truly create ASI, that severely reduces the value of humanity. We essentially give birth to our enslavers and eventually humanity will be second class on this planet. How is that something to look forward to?

StilesCrisis2• 2 months ago

I also felt a lack of representation for true, profound, and guttural loathing of AI.

Join Mastodon if this is what you're looking for. Your people are here!

whatever1• 2 months ago

The biggest risk I see is the acceleration of homogenization of everything. We are going to be getting the same average (but cheap) slop everywhere even in the space of thought.

Industrial Revolution gave material homogenization. AI revolution will give us cognitive homogenization.

rglover• 2 months ago

No need to hate it. Just understand it, know when you're dealing with someone who is viewing it through a rational lens vs. a delusional lens, and just keep doing what you were doing.

Buying into the fear is how you railroad yourself long-term. Using it while maintaining a healthy skepticism around the more radical claims means not being blindsided long-term.

Now as far as hating the turbo-zealots who smugly try to shove it down your throat in an attempt to protect their bags...

paulsutter• 2 months ago

If AI is overblown and permanently flawed, there is nothing to worry about.

If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about.

This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never really accomplish useful work yet we should be angry and fearful.

saulpw4• 2 months ago

There's this other case, which I think many people believe, that AI becomes as powerful as we fear/hope, and productivity is so high that only a few people need to work, but the superior standard of living is enjoyed by only those few people. We don't make the transition to post-capitalism and our economic dystopia is exacerbated and further entrenched.

The future may be even less evenly distributed.

joquarky6• 2 months ago

productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living

Who is "we" in this statement?

How will these gains go to those who need housing, healthcare, and education?

The current trajectory indicates the gains will go to the wealthy and the rest of us will get to fight for scraps.

Forgeties793• 2 months ago

I understand it’s trendy to like/dislike things, but the widespread disgust we have seen since day one that has refused to abate should be a clear signal that whether it is the technology or the implementation, this rollout or whatever you want to call it is simply not working and people are not buying in in the way they had hoped.

GaryBluto• 2 months ago

Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?

blanched• 2 months ago

“anti-intellectual” judgment aside, I believe it’s just a meme (in the original definition of the word).

rozap• 2 months ago

Saying that shunning the machine that is usurping human creativity and intelligence is "anti intellectual" is pretty funny

I'm not an AI hater but the implication of your comment is that being on the AI train is the intellectual position, which is wild, given the AI hype is almost entirely from CEOs, who are the furthest thing from.

lbrito5• 2 months ago

Why was this title changed? The original was better, and, well, original.

jgbuddy2• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

tavavex7• 2 months ago

It's shocking to see such an article title on HN, especially with so many upvotes. It would've been unthinkable in 2025. I always saw this website as very AI-boostery and pro-VC, pretty much as pro-AI as you could find without getting into the singularity cult. Has the audience changed, or is it the opinion of the average user that changed?

kimetime• 2 months ago

I'm not really shunning, I've gone from very high on AI to mostly exhausted with it. I wish we could skip ahead ~5 years to it being another tool in the tool belt and lessons learned about where it's good and bad. Right now everything is so same-y. Barely any oxygen for other technologies to get funding and attention, large fraction of what I read on socials is in claude's or chatgpt's voice.

... and maybe I'm wrong and get economically obsoleted. but eschatology is like catnip for every generation and I think there's a big component of that

saulpw4• 2 months ago

I feel you, I kind of want to skip ahead some years too. But it feels like 1998 internet hype--skip ahead 5 years and Facebook hasn't even been created yet. The internet certainly didn't become just another tool in the tool belt, and the worst of the internet's effects were still yet to come.

inglor_cz6• 2 months ago

Who editorialized the actual title from "Hating AI is good, actually" to "Shunning AI is the human choice"?

This article was submitted under its original title.

karmakaze2• 2 months ago

And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists?

When I was very young, I used to make up jokes that didn't really make sense, but they seemed novel and I cracked myself up. Late in life I wondered what truly original idea(s) I've had that wasn't an extension or mashup of existing ones or I'd learned from somewhere even subconsciously. It was very hard to come up with any. So this fault like many others that can be ascribed to machines can equally apply to ourselves.

I did finally think of a few, the clearest being the idea of 2*Pi being more fundamental than Pi back when I was in grade 7 math (I can visualize the room and lesson when the thought occurred to me) back in '77 long before I learned of Tau.

Codemoarguyface2• 2 months ago

It's the same as hating a calculator, luddites. No.

Codemoarguyface2• 2 months ago

It's the same as hating computers and calculators, luddites. Go back into the forest then

shantnutiwari• 2 months ago

I almost didnt read the article due to all the negative comments here.

Interesting how many people havent even read the article and are just vomitting generic "But AI is just math, and also the future" type of arguments.

cybercatgurrl• 2 months ago

hating AI is a waste of time. hating capitalism isn’t

Shunning AI is the human choice

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